File photo: An international ceasefire monitor of the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission (SLMM) examines two bodies dumped by the roadside in then government controlled Vavuniya town on 13 Oct 2006. Apart from thousands of such extra-judicial killings by Sri Lanka's military, tens of thousands more people have vanished after being taken into custody. Click photo for details. Photo TamilNet.

From a BBC article last week on a UNICEF project with the Sri Lankan government to reunite families separated during the conflict:

“At least 582 children remain missing - and that is only those for whom tracing requests have been made.

“The unit has traced 45 missing children and reunited them with their families; another 57 cases are being verified.

“Unicef says that according to reports, about two-thirds of the children who have disappeared were recruited by the Tamil Tigers; but 30%were reportedly last seen in government-controlled areas.

“At the same time, nearly 2,000 cases of adult disappearance have been reported to the tracing unit and their status remains unclear.”

In 2008, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances warned many disappearances are occurring in Sri Lanka but are not being reported because of fear of reprisals (see here).

In 2007, this is what then Army commander Sarath Fonseka had to say about disappearances (see report here):

“[The East] is not a normal area. So people getting killed and some people going missing will happen as far as the anti-terrorist operations are continuing.”

Human Rights Watch said in Dec. 2010, there have been at least 30,000 disappearances in Sri Lanka since the late 1980s.

In a 2008 report, Human Rights Watch said: “The Sri Lankan government is responsible for widespread abductions and ‘disappearances’ that are a national crisis.”

The report, titled ‘Recurring Nightmare: State Responsibility for "Disappearances" and Abductions in Sri Lanka’, is available here.

In 2003 the Red Cross stated that it had, up to then, received 20,000 complaints of disappearances during the conflict, of which 9,000 had been resolved but the remaining 11,000 were still being investigated. (See BBC’s report here)

And Sri Lanka accounts for almost 80 per cent of the case backlog of the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, according to the Asian Legal Resources Centre (see here).

Also, see our earlier posts

The logic in Sri Lanka's disappearances (Dec 2010)